We were recently asked to be part of a collaborative film called "FredEx (http://frederatorblogs.com/post/1943)". We had to come up with ten seconds of animation that featured a robot. Each creative crew was given a topic, and ours was "farts".

Nice animation and timing! There's one small detail I would like to see though. If the "ears" were actually pressure gauges that reacted to the strain/pressure-building in anticipation of the result. Nice though :)

Djampa

10-02-2006, 03:23 PM

Funny well done character, very nice animation !

kevinw

10-02-2006, 03:44 PM

Wow.. I got up this morning and went to cgtalk.. had no idea this had even been posted. I'm very surprised to see it on the front page.

Thanks for the comments everyone!

Nice animation and timing! There's one small detail I would like to see though. If the "ears" were actually pressure gauges that reacted to the strain/pressure-building in anticipation of the result. Nice though :)

I hear ya man. that was the plan all along but as the deadline snuck up on us, we just ran out of time. Might go back and add it for our own piece of mind though.

Thanks to the rest of the Bishop Crew. Everyone worked very hard to go from start to finish in just 7 days on this.

Loved the shot, simple and effective. I really liked the smoke for the fart...it was done very well. Keep it up.

FloydBishop

10-03-2006, 02:43 AM

The smoke and flames are Maya fluids. I used a 2D fluid for the fire in the belly, and a 3D fluid sim for the smoke.

It was a bit tricky getting the motion we wanted. Some of the tricks I used include animating the simulation scale value and putting in a "blocker". A blocker is what I call a piece of geometry that helps steer the particles or fluids by not allowing them to move in certain directions. Think of a herd of cows avoiding a fence. I've found that using helpers like that with simulations allow me to get the looks I'm after much faster.

FloydBishop

10-03-2006, 03:31 AM

haha funny :thumbsup:
Why didn`t you used the MR mblur ?

This was mostly a time issue. We were working on the animati nand FX right up to the last possible second. I didn't know if it would render with blur in time. We thought the post process blur worked well enough in this case.

really good work. So fun. And nice colors in the background. How did you proceed for the lighting ? Can you explain just a little bit ? Is this just some points light or is there some cool tricks to know ?
thanks

kevinw

10-04-2006, 02:00 AM

really good work. So fun. And nice colors in the background. How did you proceed for the lighting ? Can you explain just a little bit ? Is this just some points light or is there some cool tricks to know ?
thanks

no cool tricks really. Used two spot lights. One with a red hue on the left, pointed slightly up, with no shadows. And another with a blue hue on the right, higher up, pointing down with raytraced shadows. I increased the light radius to something like 20 to get some really soft shadows and then cranked the rays to like 20 or 30 to eliminate flickering. Finally I changed the environment to white and rendered with final gather to get a nice ambient fill. As a final step I lowered the final gather scale in the render settings.. so the white environment wasn't as intense.

For the background I made a sphere and flattened the bottom. then I deleted all the faces that weren't visible from the camera. This let in more light from the environment color. Lastly I used an image plane in the camera view and applied a 4-color gradient. with red in one corner, blue in another and black in the remaining corners. This gave me some color for reflection in the metal. The final background was re-created in After effects because we had more control.

Hope that covers it all. Thanks for the kind words.

ClayMathews

10-04-2006, 02:59 AM

The concept as a whole was pretty welll thought out. I like the fact that it's an old robot, it's old technology, and it looks and moves like an old man. Although I feel bad for him, only having one arm. But it did make his movements easier to read. Great job guys, the animation has great timing. It looks like you did a great job on the rig, James. Lots of small controls for overlapping animation, good stuff.

Favian001

10-04-2006, 09:28 PM

I dig the piece Floyd, nice FX and the animation was on target!

tamahoma22

10-05-2006, 03:23 AM

funny little piece you guys created there... I like the work with the eyes :)

FloydBishop

10-06-2006, 01:07 AM

...Although I feel bad for him, only having one arm. B

Don't worry, that arm didn't go to waste. It was used in another project (although it's actually the same exact hand)...

http://frederatorblogs.com/media/3423

DaVee

10-06-2006, 09:22 AM

Really nice OldIronMan,well designed and well animated.

Chers.
David.

FloydBishop

10-30-2006, 04:57 AM

Hey everyone,

Just a quick note to let you all know that the FredEx episode of Channel Frederator goes live next week. You'll be able to see the 14 other 10 second robot animations that were submitted.

Be sure to check in then: http://www.channelfrederator.com

FloydBishop

11-08-2006, 09:00 PM

The full short film is now available for download:

http://www.channelfrederator.com

MakinBacon

11-08-2006, 11:10 PM

hahaha! very very funny i lol'd

FloydBishop

11-10-2006, 01:34 AM

Here's an image we did with the Fartbot for the Channel Frederator Awards book. The books will be given out at the awards show next year.

Fartbot didn't know what an iPod was, then someone told him you put your music in it. I still don't think he gets it though.

http://frederatorblogs.com/media/4359

LloydColaco

11-10-2006, 08:11 AM

hey thats pretty funny..cool stuff!

CGTalk Moderation

11-10-2006, 08:11 AM

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.